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Wait you love me is still a better love story than Twilight.

Without an ad-blocking extension, your browser doesn’t determine what adverts you see, your browser just displays whatever the website you visit tells you to, so every browser will (in theory) display the same thing.

Rather, the website owner chooses an ad provider (usually Google), who in turn chooses the ads, but, like any other company, ad providers like Google couldn’t care less if you get scammed, as long as they make a profit.

No regulator is going to clamp down on this because companies like Google are more powerful than countries.

The best thing you can do, as Alex eluded to, is to use uBlock Origin and block ads. Google are pushing changes in Chromium (which Chrome and Edge are based on) to stop ad-blockers from working, but they still work for now, and they always will on non-Chromium browsers like Firefox.

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doriel

Can they/are they tracking while the TV is shut off?? Should I keep that logged out too?

Basically, Google has an analytics profile on you as a person. Your account, if you have one, is just part of that.

Here’s how it would work:

1. You browse to a website on your computer that has Google analytics/advertising/etc. embedded (this is most websites, not just Google-owned ones). Google gathers your IP address and your device fingerprint (and the details of the website and what you do on it) and adds it to your analytics profile.
2. You sign in to Google or YouTube on your TV. It knows you are the same person since you have the same IP address, so it adds your account to your analytics profile.
3. You sign out of Google or YouTube on your TV.
4. Maybe you reset your IP address, (wrongly) thinking it will help.
5. You browse to a website on your computer that has Google analytics/advertising/etc. embedded. Google recognises you from your device fingerprint that was added to your analytics profile in step 1, so it doesn’t matter that you’ve signed out of your account – Google still knows that you’re the same person that was using the TV earlier.

Of course, these are all personal choices I have made…….

Honestly, it’s not your fault – it’s close to impossible and certainly unreasonable for any individual user to avoid being tracked by Google and Facebook. You can limit what they know by using a non-Chrome browser and blocking analytics with uBlock Origin (this will stop websites you visit beings added to your analytics profiles), but it’s never going to stop everything. The only thing that can stop it for good is international regulation, but that’s never going to happen.

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Cybertooth

I don’t believe so. According to my memory, and according to Apple:

When you turn on FileVault, you choose how you want to unlock your startup disk if you ever forget your password:

iCloud account and password

Recovery key

So you get a choice.

To double check, I’ve had a look in my iCloud and FileVault settings, both on my Mac and on other devices, and there is no mention anywhere of the two being linked.

I set up my MacBook last year, using my Apple ID and turning FileVault on in setup, and it gave me the FileVault recovery key on the screen to copy down as part of the process. Maybe things have changed since then, but that was my experience.

As Cybertooth eluded too, you don’t need to be signed in to anything to be tracked – Facebook can track you on any site where there is a Facebook like button (it tracks both members and non-members this way). Google tracking is even more widespread, though: Google can track you on any website that uses Google advertising (Google owns 39% of the online advertising market) and any website that uses other Google technologies (Google fonts, etc.), which is probably most of them (it tracks both members and non-members this way too).

This type of tracking extends to emails, as well, with tracking pixels embedded in emails from most companies, so they know when you read their emails.

And of course, most people use Chrome as a browser, so I’ll let you imagine how much Google knows about the sites you visit from that.

The nearest thing to solutions: Use an ad blocker such as uBlock Origin, and don’t use Chrome (Firefox and Brave are your best bets). It won’t stop everything, because companies can still fingerprint your browser/computer combination (which will get tied to your account if you ever sign in to Google/Facebook, so they can link your browsing activity to your account even when you’re signed out), but it will stop most things.

On the note of whether Google can track you on a different device – I don’t see why they couldn’t, because you’re still using the same IP address. And even if you reset your IP address, your new IP address can just be linked to your old one via your device fingerprints.

It was only last year that Microsoft were touting the brand new Visual Studio for Mac 2022 and the bright future of developing for .NET on Mac. I did try it out a few months after release, but it was an absolutely painful, slow and buggy experience compared to Jetbrains’ offerings, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it simply has not been able to gain any ground in the market due to being so terrible.

Still, it does seem like a shortsighted approach, as with Oracle’s lack of care for Java and Unity’s increasing use, .NET has a real opportunity to increase its marketshare, but promoting and then swiftly taking away options from developers is not going to encourage anyone to invest in a .NET-based infrastructure.

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Alex5723

From the article:

On June 8, Apple released several big updates that included security fixes.

What are these updates? I can’t see any iOS/iPadOS/macOS/Safari updates since May 18.

They’re keeping the ‘Core’. So it will be Intel Core 5 or Intel Core 7.

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Ascaris

In my opinion, the best way to initially evaluate antivirus software is to look at the results of the following independent comparison organisations:

https://www.av-comparatives.org/comparison/

https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/

As you can see, TotalAV is rated as the worst of all of the tested products by both organisations, so it’s probably not the best choice!

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lorenzok1, southieguy, oldfry, SueW

I think the idea is not that Apple used i3/i5/i7/i9 in Macs, but that people see the ‘i’ prefix in i3/i5/i7/i9 and are reminded of iPhone/iPod/etc., and thus assume that they’re Apple products, which Intel obviously doesn’t want.

From the article:

“Does ‘I’ represent Apple with iPhone and iPod? Was it simply an unknown? That was one of the costs of people not knowing they’re our products,” Hirsch says.

According to Intel’s director of product branding, the change was partly due to customers thinking that they were Apple products.

https://www.theverge.com/21559670/intel-core-rebrand

But who’s going to voice the startup and shutdown adverts now?

Is this a feature?